In the field of medicine, imaging and image guidance are a significant component of clinical care. From diagnosis and monitoring of disease, to planning of the surgical approach, to guidance during procedures and follow-up after the procedure is complete, imaging and image guidance provides effective and multifaceted treatment approaches, for a variety of procedures, including surgery and radiation therapy. Targeted stem cell delivery, adaptive chemotherapy regimes, surgical tumour resection and radiation therapy are only a few examples of procedures utilizing imaging guidance in the medical field.
Real-time imagery of tissue being operated on may be generated by a surgical imaging system. Typically this is a sequence of images forming a video stream that is updated as a surgical operation is performed. Often there is a particular feature in the imagery that is the subject of the operation such as a glioma, white matter tracts, tendons, ligaments or muscle fibers. It may be very important for the surgeon to be able to distinguish different portions of the feature and distinguish the feature from surrounding tissue. However, while the feature may have distinguishing colour characteristics in colour imagery, it may be difficult for the surgeon to see such distinctions in a typical image or video stream.
In particular, in neurosurgery, tumours and other objects of interest often have poor colour differentiation from their surroundings. For example, a glioma can appear as a slightly off-white region in white matter. The same is true for white matter tracts in brain tissue. The ability to differentiate cancerous tissue from surrounding healthy tissue, or to find other areas of interest, is key for positive outcomes during surgery. Many of the hundreds of clinical decisions made during surgery rely on the surgeon's ability to differentiate anatomy based on contrast.